In my last blog post titled: Tested Tips for Successful eCommerce Testing I had walked you through the expectations of an online customer, and the most critical areas of e-Commerce testing. In this blog post, I will cover a few do’s and don’ts that should be kept in mind while commencing testing efforts. These tried and trusted practices have worked more businesses that count on their online presence.
Do not twitch with the home page: The exchanges do not take place on the home page. Most of the visits are not for the home page. Test downstream in the conversion path (also known as checkout) because guests that get that far are more likely to convert than ‘anyone else in the world’. Twitch where the money is, and work backwards.
Do not begin with your poorest execution page: This is another practice that has become popular. You might want to advance your bad pages; but even if you get a 10% increase, it’s only an increase on a low traffic or low value page. So it’s a no-brainer that 10% of almost nothing is still almost nothing. If you optimize a well-performing page, the conversion is useful and lucrative.
Choose pages with the most affluent traffic: If you’re spending top money to attract new guests to a product or category, you might want to make the most of that by minimizing bounce rates and maximizing devoted purchases, cross sell and up sell.
Run tests on associate landing pages: Unlike paid search traffic, you typically don’t pay for visits referred by associates; but associates are more impressed by online merchants that test. You may even give them custom landing pages and allow your associates to provide some input as they are chief marketers themselves.
Do Transaction Testing on all A-class browsers: This is essential to an e-Business application. The software used by a website has to invoke its various components, and check whether direct and indirect interfaces are working correctly. The information entered by the user should make it to the database in correct ways. When the user calls for information contained in the database, the respective data must be returned.
Test your search result and category pages: These pages are often living in shades of your fashionable home page and product pages as well as checkout page, but they are essential for getting guests to the product pages! Don’t forget about category pages that are quite alike, if not equal to, search pages for many sites.
Test and test yet again: It is extremely important to test your website and service platform from the viewpoint of a client, in order to ensure that everything runs appropriately. It’s difficult to figure out how many businesses make it evident that they do not test adequately.
Do RBT in case of time crunch: The objective of risk-based testing, a.k.a RBT approach, is to test the critical areas of the application that can cause a major failure. This helps in reducing the impact and productivity of a testing strategy. Unlike traditional testing methodology, this approach helps decrease the number of test cases.
To sum up:
Your site has to be tested, fixed, retested and fully documented. Also, all the applications utilized in the website have to be tested for performance and scalability.
The criteria for testing websites are Timeliness, Structural Quality, Content, Accuracy and Consistency, Response Time and Latency, and Performance. Some of the tests that need to be done on a website are Content Checking, Browser Compatibility, Transaction Testing, Configuration Testing, Performance & Scalability, and Security.
Web testing is still evolving because web-based software is relatively new compared to other software. Software testing has been around for a long time. However, there are many companies making software for web testing. But the challenge is to choose the one that meets the needs and budget.
